


Light And Darkness

by SomethingProfound



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Friendship, M/M, Ruthless (Mass Effect), Sole Survivor (Mass Effect), War Hero (Mass Effect), sara x ryder and maybe some shepard x miranda will show up eventually, writetober
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-08 23:04:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12263901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomethingProfound/pseuds/SomethingProfound
Summary: A variety of space-related prompt fills for Writetober for Mass Effect.





	1. Day Two: Comet (femShepley)

**Author's Note:**

> Comet: to light up the sky if only for a moment.

The six Marines and sailors are silent. Two wear the blinding white of the Navy, four the near black blue of the Marine Corps. Four of them wear blood stripes down one arm. They stand in two rows, a coffin between them of deep mahogany, the lid almost complete covered in metal pins - little gold knives piercing through black lettering - N7.

The flag has been sharply folded, three old-fashioned gunpowder shells slipped in between soft blue, and pressed into the white-gloved hands of Captain Hannah Shepard, whose eyes fix somewhere no one else can see.

Lieutenant Ashley Williams’ ears are ringing still, and she’s not sure whether it’s from the honor guard’s three volleys or the _slap_ of each N7 on the cargo deck of the SSV _Everest_ driving their insignia pins into the top of the coffin.

“All hands, bury the dead!” Anderson’s voice booms but a crack runs down the middle of it.

The weight on her shoulder is far too light when she and the other five lift the casket onto their shoulders and slowly pace to the airlock chamber and gently slid it inside. There was a viewing port and Ashley is frozen staring out of it.

For the month since that awful day, she had been consumed by a roaring fire. A rage that scorched her from the inside out and hurt and lashed out at anyone whom could be assigned a scrap of blame. Joker, the captain who’d refused to stay and search, Anderson. Now the flames have flickered and died.

“We therefore commit this body to the void, looking for the resurrection of the body when the stars shall give up their dead, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Ashley wants to laugh with the insanity of it. There is no body, just some leaden weights in the bottom. Instead she watches as the coffin that has no piece of Emilia Shepard within it shoots out into space and towards the nearest cold-burning star.  


“O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Emilia, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.”

Shepard had been a terrible Catholic, Ashley thinks. She would have been annoyed to be called by her first name.

_So Eden sank to grief,_  
_So dawn goes down to day._  
_Nothing gold can stay._

There were people who burnt so brightly you couldn’t help but watch them. Try to edge closer to their warmth. But sometimes they burnt out all too quickly.

She thinks she can see a flash of light in the midst of the deep dark as the coffin begins to burn. The last flash of Shepard’s brilliance, fading.

“Good night, dear heart;” Ashley Williams whispers to the glass, “Good night, good night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing Gold Can Stay - Robert Frost  
> Annette - Robert Richardson


	2. Day Three: Celestial Equator (MShenko)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Celestial Equator: two people looking at the same star, unknowing.

The homeworld spread out in front of his window.

Heh. Home. Earth had never been that for Shepard. It wasn’t Earth that he’d signed on for, defended against all enemies. Earth had always been abstract. Safe, far behind him, his only connection that it was the place his parents had come from.

But here he was. Commander Shepard. A restless man of action in a small room. A man of instinctual reaction and intuition confined with nothing but his guards and his own ruminations for company, clinging to his self-discipline like a drowning man clung to a piece of wood.

He’d had two homes and both had died in fire. Shepard wondered if that was how this was meant to end as well. Reapers falling from the sky and burning humanity to cinders - and him, unarmed, stretching his arms out to greet his nightmare made real.

He’d warned them, hadn’t he? He whirled, acrid bitterness eating at his insides, pacing across the tiny room. He’d tried to be a better man after Torfan, a man worth following and believing - one who could make the hard decisions when they needed to be made, but one who ruled his anger rather than being ruled by it. He’d let Balak go to save the hostaged. He’d gotten everyone through a supposed suicide mission.

He’d handed himself in to stop a war.

Shepard turned to the window and a brittle smile curled his lips. At least he’d have a good view of the apocalypse. The light of his scars reflected back to him so he almost couldn’t see the stars hanging up Vancouver, barely visible through the pollution of Earth’s atmosphere.

The hero fo the Blitz would say he’d done the right thing. He wondered if Kaidan Alenko would say the same. If he’d be able to look at Shay with all the blood dripping off his hands.

He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the glass.

* * *

Major Alenko and Sergeant Major Alenko (retired) sat on the front porch of the house the former had grown up in, beers in hand.

Being home was like wearing an old, favourite jacket. Still loved but a little tight around the shoulders, a little constricting. Kaidan had changed in ways he didn’t know how to vocalise to his parents.

But Josef Alenko didn’t ask. A man of few words, his father. Kaidan remembered coming home after months of working out himself after Vyrnnus, ready to be the man _he_ wanted to be, not who Jump Zero had made him. All his father had said was _welcome home, son,_ hugging him with arms thick from decades in the Corps. Maybe that was when that first kernel of an idea - doing good, being honourable through the Marine Corps - had sprung into his head.

He sighed, taking a long sip from his beer.

“What’s on your mind, son?” Josef Alenko asked, eyes steady in his weathered face.

Kaidan searched for the right words. He could talk with father about almost anything, including things - Marine things - his mother didn’t get. Like Virmire and Alchera, and his guilt at being alive when his friends were dead. _Let the dead rest, Kaidan. It’s tiring being the ghost in the head of a man living half a life. Live fully - that’s how you honour them._

Now, Kaidan took a sip of beer and said, “It feels wrong. To be here to testify in Sha- Commander Shepard’s trial.”

“All you can do is tell the truth. Anything else is out of your hands.”

“Yeah. I know.” He breathed out and looked up at the stars, wondering how much more time they had left. Wondering if Shepard ever thought about him with anything but anger, if he remembered the soft flicker of a spark between them that now seemed destined to gutter out.

“It’s getting late, we should turn in.”

Kaidan took one last moment to look up at the dark sky and the water of English Bay, and then followed his father inside.


	3. Day Four: Galactic Tide (Male Shepard + Female Shepard)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Galactic Tide: the force experienced by objects subject to substantial gravity

Shay Shepard and Emilia Regalado meet at Officer Candidate School; on first sight they become rivals.

Shepard has always been a competitive type of guy, and he thinks it makes him a better Marine. He’s always at the head of the pack. So when Emilia Regalado beats him, he’s almost affronted.

Then, he’s ready to get even.

It’s nothing personal. Not really. He wins honour grad by just an inch and she shakes his hand, “Congratulations, _Lieutenant._ ”

“Thank you...Lieutenant.”

“Wanna get smashed?”

* * *

The top two graduates of Arcturus Officer Candidate School spend their first night as commissioned officers in the Systems Alliance Marine Corps bar-hopping. At one point Regalado floats him down a full two stories so they can escape the master-at-arms crashing the party.

(Okay. It’d gotten a bit rowdy when some Navy types had gotten into a bit of a shoving match with some boys from the 4th MARDIV, and Emilia had decided her honour demanded she come to their defence via punching the sailor square in the jaw.)

They run a good kilometre before they stop in an alleyway between two buildings jutting from Arcturus’ superstructure and begin laughing uncontrollably.

* * *

They end up in the same Basic Officer Course and Infantry Officer Course. The rivalry has softened to antagonistic friendship.

“That the best you can do, Shepard? My grandmother runs faster than you.”

“I’ll run circles around you and your grandmother.”

“Better not say that too loud. Abuela’s an admiral.”

 

“Regalado, you call that marksmanship?”

“Listen, man, I can kill things with my mind. You fuck off with your sniper bullshit.”

“Yeah, and then your dumb arse gets shot up because you’re fighting at medium or long range instead of CQB.”

 

After they graduate, Regalado gets orders to a cruiser and he gets an order to a expeditionary brigade.

“Don’t get your idiot head shot off, Shepard.”

“Stay safe and remember how to fuckin’ aim, yeah?”

* * *

Predictably, Regalado does not stay safe. Regalado manages to get caught up in the biggest battle the Alliance has seen since the First Contact War, while on leave looking at wedding venues.

He sends her a message from the SSV Einstein, a little put out his MEB didn’t deploy to counter the attack.

_> I see you forgot even your flack jacket and got shot. Smart, Regalado._

**> I WAS ON LEAVE**

_> Always on duty, Lieutenant. Always be prepared!_

**> I fucking hate you, Shepard.**

_> Yeah, well now I have to get two Stars of Terra. You should be more considerate._

* * *

He loses his first Marine. The kid is nineteen and bleeds to death in the backseat of Shepard’s vehicle with his lieutenant’s hands, red, pressed to his side. All because the area was too hot for an air ambulance. They drive to the field hospital and Shepard helps carry Private First Class Silmani inside, but he knows it’s too late.

He gets back onboard the carrier three days later, dull-eyed, and Major Kyle tells him, a bit awkwardly, that First Lieutenant Emilia Regalado had led a mission to investigate the missing colony on Akuze, and that unit had been wiped out. They don’t expect to find survivors.

“Fuck,” Shepard says. He’s silent for a long time, covered in mud and scratches from two weeks on the ground. He shakes his head. “Fuck.”

He walks away and goes to have a shower, where he pretends it’s only the water from the faucet on his face.

* * *

Emilia Regalado survives. They say she managed to drag herself to rocky, hard ground where the maws didn’t follow, exhausted, burned and bleed, her First Sergeant’s body draped across her shoulders.

They say she was half-crazed by the time they got there. That she refused treatment or evacuation until they took the Top, the corpse, first.

He visited her on Arcturus and he thinks that maybe they were wrong that Emilia survived. There’s something in her eyes that has flickered and died.

* * *

He sends her emails.

They go unanswered.


	4. Day Five: Field Galaxy (femShepley)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Field Galaxy: to be alone is an experience shared by galaxies.

The house was built of a dark timber native to Terra Nova, and tucked away from the rest of the small town down a long, quiet road. The townspeople who would pass by to drop off vegetables or have a coffee always pressed the button beside the gate and waited for the invitation to come in. These days it always came - but that hadn’t always been the case.

Respect and trust were two sides of the same coin.

As she had for four months, Emilia Shepard woke alone in that small, timber house in a soft double bed that was nothing like an Alliance Navy sleeper pod. It was 9 am and she had nothing she had to do. She stretched, feeling the aches that would never again leave her in her thigh and spine but enjoying the feel of the soft sheets and blankets against her skin.

After ten minutes of flickering in and out of sleep, she reached over and fixed her prosthetic arm into the implant embedded in the stump of her bicep and put on her omnitool. There were messages on there - there always were. But they were no longer demanding things from her, demanding she place yet another weight on buckled and bleeding shoulders. They instead told her that there was a faculty meeting on Tuesday and that a dozen friends were trying their best to do the correspondence thing - an effort she appreciated with a soft smile and a quick reply.

Ashley had sent an email, as she always did when she had a chance. She told her funny things her troops had done, the unclassified details because she knew Shepard would never hold what she couldn’t say against her, that she was safe and a bit bored to be honest. A quote from a favourite poem that Shepard murmured to herself in the quiet of their bedroom; and a reminder that Ashley loved her.

Shepard had heard people say that saying ‘I love you’ too much made it lose its meaning, but she’d watched too many people she loved die to believe that. Every time she and her wife parted, they said it, whether it was just Shepard going to work or Ashley deploying. The words no longer had the desperation they’d had during the war, during that last terrible fight when Shepard could feel the ring on her dogtag chain pressing a bruise into her chest under her armour.

But she didn’t think they’d ever forget.

The war was always there, living inside them alongside the knowledge that neither of them were invincible, that death was as much about luck as it was skill, but these it was quieter. They were learning to live around it, how to strip each other of the hardness they had learnt to survive, to seek out the soft places and delicate dreams of peace with hands calloused by guns and knives and violence.

War had sculpted Emilia Shepard, but it wasn’t everything she was.

She was safe. She was free. She hadn’t fired a gun in anger in five years.

The table beside the bed was stacked with poetry books and a datapad with a recording on it. Even when Ashley wasn’t here, she fell asleep listening to Rumi in the rise and fall of her lover’s voice.

Shepard levered herself out of bed gingerly, careful of her body’s protests, and went to find coffee. She sipped it, dark and hot, as she fed the dog and then the chickens, humming to herself as she spread the seeds to the sound of their clucks.

The outside sun was already warm enough that sweat popped on her forehead. She liked the heat, the way it scorched the cold from her bones. She picked up the hose and began to water the flowers that clustered in riots of pink and orange and purple and red, her dog lying at her feet, ever vigilant so she didn’t need to be.

Later, she would make the careful, slow walk down to the cafe run by a woman who had left behind Earth but brought her latte art with her, where her seat in the corner where she could sit with her back to the wall was always free and no one would blink at the quiet woman in the back who always had a pistol on her hip. The owner might come over to talk and together they might marvel at the miracle that was the owner’s grandson - a little boy who would never know the Reapers - and Shepard might touch his soft downy hair. She might think this meant far more than platitudes or worship or statues - this evidence that life went on. That the pain had meant something, in the end.

For now, Emilia Shepard was alone and she tilted her her face to the sky and felt the warmth wash across her skin, her fingers curled into the dog’s thick fur.


End file.
